Speaking on NPR recently, Cokie Roberts, the soon-to-retire co-host of
ABC's This Week, falsely informed her listeners that "the
President was exonerated by the Securities and Exchange Commission." In
fact, even though his daddy was the President of the United States
during the incident in question, after a remarkably relaxed
investigation the SEC informed Bush's lawyer that its decision "must in
no way be construed as indicating that [George W. Bush] has been
exonerated."

Call me sentimental, but I'm going to miss the old gal. With no
discernible politics save an attachment to her class, no reporting and
frequently no clue, she was the perfect source for a progressive media
critic: a perpetual font of Beltway conventional wisdom uncomplicated by
any collision with messy reality.

Lippmann/Dewey fans will remember that the very idea of a watchdog press
breaks down when the watchdog starts acting like--and more important,
sympathizing with--the folks upon whom he or she has been hired to keep
an eye. With Cokie, this was never much of an issue. Her dad was a
Congressman. Her mom was a Congresswoman. Her brother is one of the
slickest and wealthiest lobbyists in the city. Her husband, Steve
Roberts, holds the dubious honor of being perhaps the only person to
give up a plum New York Times job because it interfered with his
television career. And together they form a tag-team buck-raking/book-writing enterprise offering up corporate speeches and dime-store
"Dear Abby"-style marriage advice to those unfortunates who do not enjoy
his-and-her television contracts.

Cokie came to public attention at NPR, where she developed some street
cred as a Capitol Hill gumshoe, but apparently grew tired of the hassle
of actual reporting, which only helped her career. With no concern for
the niceties of conflicts of interest, she and her husband accepted
together as much as $45,000 in speaking fees from the very corporations
that were affected by the legislation she was allegedly covering in
Congress. Moreover, she claimed something akin to a royal prerogative in
refusing to address the ethical quandary it obviously raised. (A
spokesman responding to a journalist's inquiry said that Queen Cokie's
corporate speaking fees were "not something that in any way, shape or
form should be discussed in public.")

Apparently, nobody ever told Cokie that the job of the insider pundit is
to at least pretend to be conversant with the major political, economic
and intellectual issues in question before putting these in the service
of a consensually derived story line. The pedantic George Will and the
peripatetic Sam Donaldson at least give the impression of having
considered their remarks ahead of time, either by memorizing fromBartlett's or pestering politicians. Not Cokie. Once, when a
reporting gig interfered with one of her many social and/or speaking
engagements, she donned a trench coat in front of a photo of the Capitol
in the ABC studios in the hopes of fooling her viewers. She was not a
real journalist; she just played one on TV.

Still, her commentary was invaluable, if inadvertently so. As a pundit,
she was a windup Conventional Wisdom doll. The problem with Bill
Clinton, for instance, was that he was the wrong sort for Cokie and her
kind. "This is a community in all kinds of ways," she told Sally Quinn
during the impeachment crisis. "When something happens everybody gathers
around.... It's a community of good people involved in a worthwhile
pursuit." Here was her analysis of the complicated constitutional
questions impeachment raised: "People who act immorally and lie get
punished," she proclaimed, noting that she "approach[ed] this as a
mother." (Her own children are fully grown, but perhaps they're real
sensitive...) "This ought to be something that outrages us, makes us
ashamed of him." When the country refused to go along with the ironclad
Broder/Cokester consensus, she supported impeachment anyway, because
"then people can lead public opinion rather than just follow it through
the process." These same "people," meaning Ken Starr, Newt Gingrich and
Cokie's friends, made a return appearance in Cokieworld when the Supreme
Court handed Al Gore's victory to George W. Bush following the Florida
2000 election crisis. "People do think it's political, but they think
that's OK," she averred. "They expect the court to be political, and
they wanted the election to be over."

All this is relevant to those of you who are not dewy-eyed about Cokie's
departure--or Dewey-eyed about democracy, for that matter--because
Cokie's inadvertent honesty helps us understand how George W. Bush ever
made it to the White House in the first place. Why are we hearing about
Harken Oil only today? Why did the press ignore the evidence of Bush's
personal and professional dishonesty back in 2000, when it still
mattered? Meanwhile, these same reporters concocted stupid stories about
Al Gore's penchant for "exaggeration," misreporting the simplest facts
on his (essentially accurate) claims about the Internet, Love Canal andLove Story. It's not as if evidence of Bush's unsavory past was
unavailable. I wrote about it twice on MSNBC.com, in the fall of 2000,
following a damning Talk magazine exposé of Bush's
suspicious business ethics, written by Bill Minutaglio and Nancy Beiles,
and based on documents made public by the Center for Public Integrity.
But nobody cared. The Times, the Post, the Journal,
CBS, ABC et al.--who had all championed Ken Starr's $70 million
investigation of a $30,000 unprofitable land deal--did not think Bush's
fortune-making sweetheart deals were worth more than the most cursory of
investigations. (Let's not even bring up the dubious Texas Rangers deal
or the missing years in his National Guard record.)

How did the media--and hence the nation--manage to miss these stories?
Just ask Cokie: As she explained back then in defense of herself
and her colleagues, "The story line is Bush isn't smart enough and Gore
isn't straight enough. In Bush's case, you know he's just misstating as
opposed to it playing into a story line about him being a serial
exaggerator." Thus spake Cokathustra.

Events in Washington are potentially momentous, but hold the applause.
In late May, the Dow was at 10,300, but by mid-July it had dropped
almost 2,000 points. The Nasdaq and S&P indexes are at zero gain for
the past five years, as if the bubble never occurred. This slow-motion
crash induced even the most obedient right-wing lapdogs to scurry aboard
the Sarbanes reform bill, and the Senate passed it, 97-0. The President
made two malaprop-laced pep talks to recast himself as Mr. Reformer Guy
(and knocked another 500 points off the Dow). But W. is a lagging
political indicator these days. Even Federal Reserve Chairman Alan
Greenspan has lost his touch. For years he celebrated the new economy
and refused to take any action that might have worked to curb its
excesses; a bit late he tells us "irrational exuberance" was actually
"infectious greed." Now, with fear overtaking that greed in the markets
and thus in Washington, the ingredients are present for an ideological
sea change in American politics. But not yet.

Democrats, newly awakened to the potency of Enron-like financial
scandals, are throwing smart punches at the business-friendly White
House, but they are six months late to the cause (and still sound less
convinced than Republican maverick John McCain). The passage of Senator
Sarbanes's legislation is meaningful, but Democratic leaders choked on
the hard part--reforming stock options and giving workers a voice in
managing their own pension savings. Why mess up fundraising with those
high-tech companies dumping "New Dem" millions on the party of working
people? Majority leader Tom Daschle, who lamely promised a vote
(someday) on the stock-option issue, will be revealed as another limp
corporate shmoozer if he fails to deliver. So far, the Coca-Cola
directors have more courage than he. Likewise, Senator Joseph Lieberman
can doubtless raise millions from Silicon Valley for his presidential
ambitions by defending the corporate hogs but, if so, he should rethink
which party will have him.

The Republicans are in a deeper hole, of course. If Bush wants to bring
his much-touted "moral clarity" to the reform cause, he'll have to drop
the weepy speeches and dump Harvey Pitt as SEC chairman and Tom White,
the Enronized Army Secretary. Then Bush should take his own medicine and
come clean, open the secret SEC records of his insider cashout as a
director of Harken, and do the same for the SEC investigation of Vice
President Cheney's stewardship as CEO of Halliburton. Republican zealots
and their attack-dog newspaper, the Wall Street Journal,
exhausted the nation with their pursuit of the Clintons on Whitewater.
Stonewalling by the Bush White House promises to make these far more
serious financial matters a permanent theme of the Bush presidency.

The reforms currently in motion are a good start, but no more, as
William Greider notes on page 11. We know what to expect from the
Republicans--stubborn maneuvering and guile designed to stall real
change until (they hope) the stock market turns around and public anger
subsides. But Democrats have a historic opening far greater than this
fall's elections--the opportunity to revive their role as trustworthy
defenders of the folks who have always been the bone and sinew of the
party, the people who do not get stock options and who deserve a much
larger voice in Washington. If Democrats take a pass on the facts before
them, they deserve our scorn. If they find the courage to break out of
the corporate-money straitjacket and once again speak for the public,
this could be the beginning of something big.

In a brief filed in connection with an appeal to the Supreme Court in a
gun possession case, the Bush Justice Department, breaking with sixty
years of jurisprudence, asserts that individuals have a constitutionally
protected right to own firearms. Seeking to quiet ghosts of gun debates
past as the November elections approach, the Administration tries to
reassure us that this proposed sea change in American law would, if
realized, leave law enforcement and gun laws unaffected. But in doing
so, it elevates sophistry and doublespeak to a new art form.

In the case in question, a lower court held that a provision of the 1994
amendment to the gun control act prohibited one Timothy Emerson from
possessing a Beretta pistol, since he was under a domestic-violence
restraining order obtained by his wife. Even after a court issued the
restraining order, Emerson used the pistol to threaten his wife and
daughter as they entered his office to retrieve the daughter's shoes. In
his appeal, Emerson claimed that the restriction abridged his Second
Amendment rights. The Justice Department, in its brief to the High
Court, departed from its historical position and agreed that Emerson did
possess an individualized Second Amendment right. But in a legal
high-wire act, it argued that this right was nonetheless trumped by his
misconduct and that, therefore, the indictment should stand.

Gun control advocates criticized the inclusion of the constitutional
assertion in the department's brief as gratuitous. But on this they miss
the point. The real goal of Justice's new strategy is not to throw a
bone to the gun lobby but to mount a backdoor attack on the very
legitimacy of gun laws it doesn't like but doesn't have the guts, in the
current political climate, to try to repeal legislatively. For as the
Administration knows, elevating gun rights into the rarefied sphere of
constitutional rights would create new, perhaps insurmountable, legal
hurdles for existing gun violence statutes.

Individual rights, such as freedom of speech and religion, to which the
Attorney General claims gun rights are analogous, occupy a unique area
of American law. The Court has repeatedly held that legislative
encroachments in these areas are presumptively invalid unless narrowly
tailored to meet compelling government interests. On this basis, the
Court has invalidated laws in the areas of affirmative action, free
exercise of religion and freedom of speech. Recently, in Ashcroft v.
Free Speech Coalition, it held that a law prohibiting virtual child
pornography was too broadly drafted, and the putative harm it sought to
prevent too speculative to pass constitutional muster. Were the Court to
embrace the Bush view on the Second Amendment, the likely result would
be to invalidate many federal and state gun laws, like the popular Brady
law and the ban on assault weapons.

In passing the 1993 Brady Act, which is applied to the general
population to screen out felons and other miscreants from buying
firearms, the House and Senate judiciary committees did not consciously
undertake the exactingly narrow drafting requirements necessary to
overcome the constitutional hurdles placed on such rights as speech or
religion. Rather, they acted under the authority of the Constitution's
commerce clause, which gives Congress broad legislative discretion. And
while Justice's brief, arguing that the prohibition on gun possession by
those with domestic-violence restraining orders could pass the "narrow
tailoring" constitutional test it seeks generally for gun laws, may be
correct, it is unclear, even improbable, that the broader purpose of
laws like the Brady Act (background checks for everyone) could survive
the test.

Similarly, because the ban on military-style assault weapons, intended
to remove the tools of many gang-type street massacres, was broadly
drafted to apply to everyone, that law could be invalidated on the
grounds that it is not sufficiently tailored to prohibit access by those
with criminal records. So, too, could scores of state and local laws,
such as the ban on handgun possession in the District of Columbia. The
new proposal by Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman to apply
background checks at gun shows could also be constitutionally dead on
arrival should the Administration view of gun rights become law.

Indeed, this is not the first time since September 11 that the Attorney
General has catered to gun owners. In October, responding to gun lobby
paranoia about gun registries, he refused to give the FBI access to
records that could help it determine if post-September 11 detainees had attempted to purchase weapons.

Each year we lose roughly 28,000 people at the wrong end of a gun
barrel, nearly ten times the number of people who perished on September
11. As the Violence Policy Center has documented, Al Qaeda terrorist
training manuals note the ease with which one can obtain firearms in the
United States--like the .50-caliber rifles that can with precision blow
a nine-inch hole in a concrete wall from 100 yards. At a minimum,
criminals and terrorists will benefit from new defenses that gun
prosecutions violate constitutional rights as envisioned by the Bush
Justice Department. Prior to his plea agreement, attorneys for the
so-called American Taliban, John Walker Lindh, had already indicated his
intention to invoke such a defense on his behalf.

If, when the Attorney General is proclaiming about the need to restrict
Americans' civil liberties, he seeks to expand constitutional liberties
for gun owners, he should at least be straight with the American people
about the likely legal consequences and what it could mean for safety on
our streets.

It used to be a matter of flashing a badge and appealing to patriotism,
but these days federal agents are finding it a little harder to get
librarians to spy. Under an obscure provision of the USA Patriot Act,
federal agents can obtain a warrant to acquire information about library
users. According to a recent survey, agents have been showing up at libraries--a lot--asking librarians for reading
records. Nearly everything about the procedure--from the granting of the
warrants to the search itself--is secret (as an excellent story in theSan Francisco Chronicle pointed out recently). But, unlike in the
cold war years, when the FBI last tried to conduct such library
surveillance, this time around, top librarians are on the warpath to
protect reader privacy. And Congress wants Attorney General John
Ashcroft to account for his agents' library conduct.

It wasn't like this back in George W.'s daddy's day.

Between 1973 and the late 1980s, the FBI operated a secret
counterintelligence operation called the Library Awareness Program. Back
then the Feds were particularly concerned about what Soviet bloc
citizens were reading in the nation's premier science libraries. In the
words of Herbert Foerstel, a science librarian in those years, "Agents
would approach clerical staff at public and university libraries, flash
a badge and appeal to their patriotism in preventing the spread of
'sensitive but unclassified' information."

Today, with Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act in hand, law enforcement
agents are at it again. This time, the stated purpose is to gather
information on people the government suspects of having ties to
terrorists or plotting an attack. The act makes it hard to track just
what's going on. Anyone who receives an FBI request is prohibited, under
threat of prosecution, from revealing the FBI visit to anyone, even to
the patron whose records are subject to search.

On April 3 I interviewed Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of the
American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, on
Working Assets Radio, and the interview illustrated the problem. To
paraphrase: Flanders: "How many libraries have received information
requests from the FBI?" Stone: "They are not allowed to tell us, and we
are not allowed to say."

But in February one enterprising library sciences professor sent a
survey to 1,503 libraries around the country. Dr. Leigh Estabrook asked
librarians for answers to a set of questions, to which they did not have
to append their name. According to Estabrook's raw data, presented this
spring at a Public Library Association conference, eighty-five of the
libraries surveyed report that authorities (for example, FBI or police)
requested information about their patrons pursuant to the events of
September 11. More worrisome, about one-fifth of the libraries said
staff had changed their attitude toward or treatment of users in some
way. More than 10 percent (118) reported that they had become more
restrictive of Internet use. Seventy-seven said they had monitored what
patrons were doing.

Librarians on the alert aren't necessarily a bad thing. In Florida, an
attentive Delray Beach librarian reported the use of her library by a
group of Middle Eastern men, and they turned out to have connections to
the attacks of 9/11.

But some of this monitoring may be illegal. Since the abuses of the cold
war, almost every state has passed confidentiality laws to protect the
privacy of personal records. Since passage of the USA Patriot Act, the
American Library Association has been busy reminding librarians of their
abilities to question things like federal search warrants and advising
them of the best practices to undertake to protect confidentiality of
patrons and themselves. In January, the ALA released a set of guidelines
to inform librarians of what search warrants were, what subpoenas were
and how they could react if in fact they were presented with such
documents. Then in June, the ALA's governing council passed a resolution
publicly affirming the privacy rights of patrons and implicitly
instructing library staff to do all they can to protect their clients'
privacy.

"Privacy is essential to the exercise of free speech, free thought and
free association," says the ALA council statement, in part. It wouldn't
be a bad idea for librarians to post the statement in the stacks.
Concerned library readers should also know that one sure-fire way to
keep your reading records private is to take back your borrowed books on
time. The ALA's Stone told Working Assets Radio that the circulation
software most libraries use today automatically erases a reader's
borrowing record once a book is returned and all fines are paid.

Congress is getting interested as well. On June 13 a bipartisan
committee sent a twelve-page letter to John Ashcroft demanding details
on the implementation of the USA Patriot Act. Representative James
Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, the staunch conservative chair
of the House Judiciary Committee, and Michigan Democrat John Conyers,
the progressive, ranking Democrat, want to know, among other things,
just how many subpoenas the Justice Department has issued to libraries,
bookstores and newspapers under Section 215 and what safeguards are in
place to prevent abuse. The letter asked for written answers by July 9,
which at presstime had yet to be received; then Sensenbrenner and
Conyers plan to hold hearings on the response. Are G-men harassing your
librarian? The hearings should make for good, hot summer viewing on
C-Span. Meanwhile, library staff are under a lot of pressure--why not
drop by or write to your librarian and send a message of support?